The Trump phenomenon requires us to transition from reality TV to reality. I am afraid Donald Trump has trumped all norms of civility and decency. He doesn't want to answer any normal questions that have been asked as part of the presidential primaries for a long time. He doesn't want to release his tax returns. He insults anyone he dislikes for whatever reason. His beef doesn't have to have any legitimacy. He may simply dislike the person, his/her question or the way the person may have asked the question. He considers himself above and beyond any normal scrutiny of the presidential primaries and elections. He is Donald Trump. That should be reason enough for everyone to shut up and just vote for him to be the President of the United States.
He has branded most Mexican immigrants in the USA as murderers and rapists. He wants to build a wall on the border between USA and Mexico. He wants to prevent all Muslims except the mayor of London who happens to be Muslim from entering the USA. He has shamelessly attacked women who dared disagree with him. He attacks journalists for simply doing their job; asking tough questions of someone who wants to be able to control the nuclear buttons of USA, the most powerful country in the world. He wants to be able to occupy, unscrutinised, the most powerful office in the world. He has encouraged violence by his supporters and turned a blind eye to it when it has happened.
One can forever analyse the Trump phenomenon; the alienation most Americans feel from Washington or the traditional politicians, the increasingly unstable world, the sense of vulnerability some Americans may feel post 9/11. The Tea Party with its sustained shameless racist campaign against the first black president of the USA, has undoubtedly aided the birth of Trump--the presidential candidate. There is an almost parallel rise of the xenophobic and racist right in several European countries.
The republicans, at least a significant number of them, can't decide whether they can support an avowed racist Donald Trump as their candidate. The fact that most of them can't decide to oppose him outright is a serious shame. The Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln, the slayer of slavery, has come to a sorry pass.
Donald Trump is a xenophobe, racist and misogynist, showing all the signs of a neo-fascist in the making. As Canadians it is up to us to decide whether we will play dumb spectators next door. We have no vote in the USA elections. But we have a choice to make particularly as USA's neighbours sharing the longest undefended and relatively open border with them. Our future, more than that of any other country, is inextricably tied to the fate of the United States of America. If we choose silence, officially or unofficially, it may not render us Chamberlainian appeasers. Last I checked the USA was an independent country. But so was Germany during the rise of fascism.
Recently we have witnessed Trump shamelessly attacking the free press. He has already vilified the Mexicans, Muslims and many women. USA in 2016 is a country of an increasingly smaller world. In that smaller world human beings and the countries rub elbows against each other. We live cheek by jowl, in most places figuratively, and in our own geography, quite literally.
I remember the large anti Vietnam war demonstrations in UK where I had landed from India in 1964 and in Canada when I landed here in 1968.
Silence now is not an option. We must raise our voices as citizens of the world in aid of those who want to defeat Trump's neo-fascism.
@ujjaldosanjh
